NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 29th February 2008 06:28 PM GMT] Developing policies on conflicts regarding financial interests held by US medical colleges, teaching hospitals and research institutions has proven a much thornier task than targeting conflicts among individual faculty members.
Institutions "are struggling with determining how best to deal with these kinds of institutional conflicts," David Korn, point man on conflicts of interest at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), told The Scientist. "The uptake of those policies has... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 28th February 2008 09:07 PM GMT] Two national academic associations have called on US academic institutions to develop and implement rules that manage institution-wide conflicts of interest and refine rules that deal with conflicts among faculty of medical schools, teaching hospitals, and research universities.
The report, issued today (Feb. 28) by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 28th February 2008 06:20 PM GMT] In the first ever functional imaging study of the communicating chimpanzee brain, researchers have found that brain function in grunting and gesturing chimpanzees closely parallels that in actively communicating humans, according to a paper published online today in Current Biology.
"A set of brain areas were active in the chimps that have also been reported to be active when humans are communicating,"... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 27th February 2008 08:42 PM GMT] The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) cancer researcher whose home was invaded last Sunday, has commented on the attack to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The researcher, who remains unnamed for security purposes, told the Sentinel that her family was celebrating the birthday of one of her two small children in the front of the house Sunday afternoon, when... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 26th February 2008 10:55 PM GMT] Attackers broke into the home of a University of California, Santa Cruz scientist who uses animals to study breast cancer and neurological disorders, on Sunday (Feb. 24), according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Another California animal researcher - UCLA neurologist, Edythe London - has been the target of vandalism recently, with an animal rights group claiming responsibility for... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 25th February 2008 08:25 PM GMT] Almost one year after the Encyclopedia of Life announced its plan to construct a comprehensive, online catalog of biodiversity, the website will unveil its first 30,000 species pages tomorrow (Feb. 26).
With $50 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other funders, and scientific support from a gaggle of universities and museums, the Encyclopedia of Life began digitizing and organizing scientific... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd February 2008 03:48 PM GMT] In an intriguing election-year twist, James Watson, the renowned biologist who made headlines last October when he told the Sunday Times that people of African descent were less intelligent than white people, has supported a person of African descent for President of the United States, according to the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd February 2008 02:57 PM GMT] A California judge issued a temporary restraining order yesterday (Feb. 21) against three underground animal rights groups and five individuals associated with these groups to prevent them from harassing and threatening UCLA scientists who conduct experiments with animals, according to the university. The restraining order prohibits members of the UCLA... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 22nd February 2008 02:46 PM GMT] For 25 years, a university town in Illinois has become insect central for day thanks to entomologist May Berenbaum's Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The festival - which will celebrate its 25th year tomorrow (Feb. 23) - usually features a few campy films starring insects (more Mothra, less ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 21st February 2008 05:37 PM GMT] Science and medical publishing giant Reed Elsevier has announced that is putting Reed Business Information (RBI), the largest business-to-business publisher in the US, up on the auction block. The sale will include New Scientist.
Although Reed Elsevier also owns The Lancet and Cell, among other journals, as well as science and medical textbooks, none of those titles are for sale.
RBI also publishes Variety and other... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 21st February 2008 04:09 PM GMT] In response to several recent attacks on University of California, Los Angeles researchers, the school is suing three animal rights groups and several people associated with the groups.
"Enough is enough," UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said in a university press release. "We're not willing to wait until somebody is injured before taking legal... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 19th February 2008 05:10 PM GMT] The US Food and Drug Administration admitted yesterday that it never inspected a Chinese facility supplying the active ingredient in heparin, a widely used blood thinner recently implicated in more than 350 adverse reactions and four deaths in US patients. The oversight resulted from a case of mistaken identity, according to a... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 15th February 2008 07:50 PM GMT] A South Korean biotech company has announced it will, for the first time ever, commercially clone a pet dog, according to reports coming out of the country.
RNL Bio said last week that it received an order from Californian Bernann McKunney, to clone her deceased pet pitbull, Booger, to the tune of $150,000. Booger died in 2005, but not before McKinney had tissue from his ear preserved.
The Korean company told the... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 14th February 2008 06:22 PM GMT] A team of Japanese researchers has changed epithelial cells from the livers and stomachs of adult mice into pluripotent cells that resemble embryonic stem cells, according to a paper in this week's Science.
In 2006, the Kyoto University team, led by Shinya Yamanaka, used retroviruses to transfect adult mouse fibroblasts and embryonic cells with four transcription factors,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 12th February 2008 11:02 PM GMT] Most US medical schools excel at keeping an eye on conflicts of interest among their faculty. But they're not so good at keeping an eye on themselves, according to a study out today.
In a 2006 survey of the nation's 125 accredited allopathic medical school deans, only 38 percent of survey respondents said that they had adopted institutional conflict of interest policies applicable to their institution's own financial ties. In contrast,... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 11th February 2008 09:00 PM GMT] National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) director David Schwartz, who officially resigned from the agency last Friday, told The Scientist that NIEHS "could do better" and will "be more successful" under new leadership.
Schwartz also said that the environmental health community misunderstood his goals as director of NIEHS. "There was a belief that I was creating a clinical institute," he said, "when I had no... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 11th February 2008 04:06 PM GMT] After a tumultuous three-year stint, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) director David Schwartz officially stepped down on Friday (Feb. 8).
During his time as NIEHS director, Schwartz's leadership was often questioned. Scientists and lawmakers criticized Schwartz in 2005 when he pushed for privatizing the institute's journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, and last August more than 100 NIEHS researchers ... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 6th February 2008 07:54 PM GMT] The Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest independent funder of biomedical research, announced yesterday (Feb 5) that it will increase its spending from about £2.5 billion (roughly 4.9 billion USD) over the last five years to about £4 billion (roughly 7.8 billion USD) over the next five years.
The trust said that it will put more money towards large-scale genetic studies, neuroscience research, and new technologies and facilities... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 6th February 2008 04:29 PM GMT] A fire was set at the home of a University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist targeted by animal rights activists in the past.
The fire was caused by a device left on the house's front porch on Tuesday (Feb. 5), FBI officials told the Los Angeles Times. No one was home at the time the device ignited, and no one was hurt in the fire. UCLA addiction researcher Edythe London owns the house, which was... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 4th February 2008 08:56 PM GMT] In his FY 2009 budget, released this morning, President George W. Bush calls to freeze the National Institutes of Health's budget at last year's level of about $29 billion while shaving more than $370 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2008 budget.
The president's budget also suggests decreasing research funding at the US Department of Agriculture by more... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 1st February 2008 09:11 PM GMT] The editor of The Lancet has banned members of international aid group Doctors Without Borders (Medicins sans Frontieres or MSF in French) from publishing articles in the journal, according to a story in Science magazine today (Feb. 1). Did members of the aid organization break an embargo? Fail to disclose conflicts of interest? Fabricate data? Nope. They just posted... Click to continue
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NewsBlog: [Entry posted at 1st February 2008 07:57 PM GMT] I've been looking into how global health programs evaluate the effects of their interventions for a story that will appear in our March issue. Public health experts have told me again and again that too little attention has been paid to evaluation across the board.
This morning (Feb.1), both The Washington Post and ... Click to continue
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